October 2, 2007

Many of the women I'd met [at Yale Law School] had come from the most privileged of circumstances, yet they often referred to themselves as "oppressed." I found it hard to take their "oppression" seriously, since I'd spent the first part of my life living among black women who cooked and kept house for the middle- and upper-class whites of Savannah. They never talked about being oppressed. What right, then, did the elite white women of Yale have to complain about their lot?

This is in a part of the book where he describes feeling much more comfortable around the people who worked in the Missouri attorney general's office in Jefferson City. He liked the way these people talked about a lot of things other than politics and had political opinions that "ranged all the way across the spectrum, with a generous sprinkling of indifference in between." He especially liked the way none of the "white secretaries" were radical feminists. Because they didn't complain about oppression, he got the feeling these women would, like him, have scoffed at the privileged white feminists at Yale, and he liked that feeling: "I began to relax, and to see and live life more fully."

Secretaries who don't complain are so much easier to take than those feminists who are always needling you.

ADDED: Welcome Instapundit readers. This is one of many posts about the book. I'm blogging as I go. If you want to find the other posts, go to the main page of the blog and scroll. So far, there's this on the "60 Minutes" interview, this on taking a bath at his grandfather's house, this on feeling like law school was a swirling miasma, and this on his reading of Ayn Rand. More to come.

MORE: As chairman of the EEOC, Thomas had little feeling for the problems of white, middle class women. Here's his description of a meeting with Women Employed, a group advocating for equal pay (page 165):

About a hundred mostly white women showed up. They gave every impression of being successful, and judging by the questions they asked me, they were smart and sophisticated as well. Yet I couldn't understand how angry they seemed to be about their lot in life. How could these well-off white women be more bitter than the poor blacks and Hispanics with whom I met regularly at the EEOC?

Well, I suppose they have to use separate bathrooms to this day, but how many white middle class women were lynched in the south after the civil war?

I realize that oversimplifies the picture, but I get the point Thomas is making. The problem with it (or one of them) is that it assumes freedom from the threat of death is the sole criterion for not being oppressed, but of course, women were far from fear of violence and were no more full economic and political participants than blacks. I can't really agree with Thomas on that, but I can imagine that it must have been galling to see people who really hadn't been as oppressed actively or tacitly suggesting parity with the oppression he saw growing up.

"Secretaries who don't complain are so much easier to take than those feminists who are always needling you."

I disagree. Marxists always thought themselves enlightened and that the oppressed classes simply don't realize they're oppressed (i.e. 'false consciousness'), so ignore the laborers who don't complain, listen instead to the rich children of privilege, they know what's good for you.

Secretaries are either blind to their fate or acculturated to be submissive or or fearful about losing their jobs, so do not complain. Or so the theory goes, and secretaries as a rule being inferior to academic feminists on the whole enlightenment thing don't and can't know how they really feel. Let feminists tell you how you really feel.

P.S. I'm still waiting for my check from the Ruling White Males Society. Should I call?

New Yorker cartoon from the 60s (upper management husband at meal table with wife) : What do women want, Mildred?

The joke can go either way.

My gender theory is that complaining is what women do, to send men on quests ; so there's something to reward them for.

Even if they screw up (the heart of the old Get Smart series).

Feminism formalizes sending men on quests to no particular man, but men in general. Unfortunately there's no way to reward men in general. You get stuck in a single repeating movement of complaint forever.

As Derrida put it, feminism has not progressed since the day it was born, but marches in place.

(Choriographies, an interview with Christine MacDonald, in some old Diacritics.)

Anita Hill's saga is a moment in this single story and so had legs, rather than disappearing, as it ought to have, instantly.

The New Yorker woman was being invited to that single moment which every marriage consists of. Has she neglected to show her man that she's satisfied with him?

As to careers for women, can Larry Summers be rephrased to ask whether women get as much out of science as men do, when they do it? And so may choose otherwise, in general.

Yeah, Professor Althouse, you're right to needle Thomas. After all, how could a black man, abandoned by his father and raised in the Jim Crow South, possibly think that rich white women at Yale Law School hadn't been as oppressed as he was? What was he thinking?

It's interesting that what causes Thomas to "relax and live life more fully" is that he encounters white women who don't complain about any unfairness in their circumstances. Also intriguing is his conclusion that they, like him, would have scoffed at the more privleged women at Yale.

Maybe that's true, and they had disdain for women who "complained" about gender inequities in society. Or maybe he's completely wrong. Maybe they would have seconded those expressions, which perhaps they felt less free to make because economic conditions made that too risky. (The secretary in the mid 1970s who complained about being oppressed may have found herself the secretary in the unemployment line, especially if her boss was the type who belittled the idea that women can be oppressed by men.) It's the height of arrogance to claim kinship with people over their silence, especially when perhaps your attitude is part of the reason they are keeping silent.

"Secretaries who don't complain are so much easier to take than those feminists who are always needling you."

Indeed. Thomas proves himself incapable of empathy, failing to identify with, let alone understand, the deep pain of oppression felt by elite white women at Yale who, just like him, were Affirmative Action admits. His stubborn refusal to identify with these women, who were fighting the same power he was fighting, to wallow in his own self pity, shows what a shallow, selfish man he is. And then, when offered the golden, life-changing chance to improve his standing in life by associating with the oh-so-obviously better women of Yale Law School, he selfishly rejected it all for the workplace collegiality of non-Yale educated pink collar secretaries.

Like everything else, "oppression" comes in many forms. If you are on the receiving end of a screw job, the fact that someone else has had a harder life, or been subjected to a worse screwing, is beside the point. It may put things in perspective, but it doesn't change the fact that you've been screwed.

The assumption of many is that the Yalies Thomas is talking about were desperate to see themselves as "victims" of something (preferably something done by men), but really had no idea what "oppression" was all about. Perhaps. But judging someone else's life in that way, when you know nothing about them, is a bit much. The point of the criticism is that the Yale "victims" were confusing their fantasies with real "oppression"; but the critics here are doing the same stereotyping thing -- confusing their fantasy image of whiny, rich, pampered YLS feminists with whatever the reality about these unnamed women might have been.

Nor does the comparison to the happy, contended secretaries in Missouri really add much. Perhaps the Yalies shared the same feeling that Thomas says he had -- that his Yale degree wasn't worth fifteen cents, since even with it, he found it almost impossible to find a job. Women seeking legal jobs in the '60s may well have felt that they faced similar barriers.

But I think Thomas is right to be dismissive of people whose only response to whatever "oppression" they think they suffered, is just to complain. No one wants to listen to a lot of complaining for its own sake. The point is to do something about whatever is supposedly "oppressing" you. If it's not important enough to do something about it, it's almost certainly not important enough for others to care about either. On that score, the women who came out of YLS and other law schools in the '60s probably don't have much to apologize for -- the legal profession today is a lot different from what it looked like then, and the reason is that a lot of those whiny Yalies (among many others) did something to bring about that change.

I think it may be a mistake to treat this passage as a statement about Justice Thomas's present views. It seems from the passage excerpted that he is relating honestly his reaction to the upper middle class feminists he encountered at Yale, not attacking their grievances or feminism generally.

This is the problem with how memoirs are reviewed. This will be repeated as proof that Justice Thomas is uncomfortable around women unless they are in subordinate roles and keep quiet, when it can just as easily be read as a candid recollection of his naivete at the time he started his career.

That he regarded the difference between racial prejudice in Savannah and the barriers to Yale-educated white women from privileged backgrounds as one not just of degree but of kind is not exactly earth-shattering. Intellectual honesty demands as much.

I don't think it does much good to complain -- unless venting helps you somehow. That said, Clarence Thomas' inability to empathize with his classmates' feelings says a lot about him. Apparently, unless you've suffered as much as he has, you have to keep your mouth shut because you're not really, you know, oppressed oppressed, you just think you are oppressed. I think he sees the world too much through the prism of his upbringing.

The secretary in the mid 1970s who complained about being oppressed may have found herself the secretary in the unemployment line, especially if her boss was the type who belittled the idea that women can be oppressed by men.

No maybies about it. I worked as a secretary when I first got out of college in the late 70's, and that was the prevailing attitude: "Bosses are @ssholes, but what can you do and where are you gonna go?" And if you went and you did, you were a "troublemaker."

And there was a class resentment between the secretaries who had gone no further than high school and those who sported a (temporarily useless) degree from a state university, so you can imagine the resentment that existed between Katie Gibbs graduates and Yalies. (Katie Gibbs is what used to be called a secretarial school. Now they have two-year degrees and diplomas for skilled trades and they have a co-ed enrollment.)

Certainly, one's own suffering is not to be dismissed simply because it is not as severe as another's, but the failure to recognize how comparatively less hard one has it is maddening to those who suffer severely.

Indeed, most US citizens have the cushiest life on the planet and betters that experienced by all but a few people in the entire history of the world.

But the complaints have riseen over time, and people are even less happy than before.

It's an insult to those of the Depression Era and survivors of WW2 prison camps to complain about modern US "hunger" problems. It's an insult to blacks of the 1930s and 1950s who experienced Jim Crow and lynchings to discuss today's society as if it were somehow worse than ever before.

Women today outnumber men in college and among their faculty. but you'd think they were as a a group still being kept barefoot and pregnant. Such petulance is more than annoying, it polarizing and destructive.

Madison Man: I think you're being taken in by Thomas's word choice. He writes "complain" as a way to minimize the significance of feminist analysis. He also forefronts the comparison between his terrible poverty and middle class life. Don't be manipulated by that rhetoric.

The oppressed elite white women of Yale remind me of when Bertie Wooster had to do without Jeeves for a few days. He ruminated on how difficult it was to tie his own bow tie, and get his own tea, and realized that a lot of men had to do these things themselves every day. Bertie concluded that he now understood how the poor lived.

The problem with self-defining as oppressed is that your very existence is then controlled by others -- your oppressors. That's fine if you want to wander through life aimlessly, but if you have direction and drive, can you actually be oppressed?

What a wild wholly ride, you take us on this morning going back to Richard Nixon and the roots of the black Democratic bias. But of course when you write that we will be "saddled" with Thomas since he is only 59, the red light of your patent bias alerts any reader to the thrust of your shallow rant against Thomas. The piece on Clarence Thomas on "60 Minutes" was sympathetic and revealing. But of course not for you.Is your phony anger/outrage all you took away from the program? Your mind set has become so predictably liberal, so filled with bile for Thomas and anti Bush maybe, instead of wasting the precious trees of the Northwest, stay home, lock the door and scream.

Dick Bernly: So! This is what you're into now! Bondage! Judy: What's that? Dick Bernly: Bondage, S&M, sex games! Judy: That's right! All of it, I'm into everything, now get out of here! Dick Bernly: Who was that guy? Judy: He's my boss. Dick Bernly: Your boss! You're having an affair with your boss, isn't that typical! Judy: Just like you had an affair with your secretary! Dick Bernly: But, Judy, you can't do this! This isn't you! Judy: Don't you tell me what I can or can't do! Those days are over! And if I want to have an affair, or play sex games, or do M&M's, you can't stop me! Dick Bernly: M&M's? ( 9 to 5, 1980)

All Thomas was really interested in was getting laid. Clarence wasn't prejudiced; he'd do a rich white feminist at Yale or a struggling black subordinate like Professor Hill at the EEOC. And don't make him mad by turning down his sexual advances. What's he ever done to help poor, black, wash women in Savannah beyond lip service? Lip service is probably his favorite pastime, if you know what I mean.

He's also an intellectual lightweight and a pervert like Sen. Larry Craig. Btw, what have any of his Supreme Ct. decisions done for anybody except for the mostly white, mostly male, rich? A la Ayn Rand, he has zero compassion for anyone except himself. PATHETIC! He should submit his resignation immediately - before anymore of his idiotic, atavistic decisions cause more chaos and harm to the welfare of the America people.

It is interesting how some people on here expect Thomas to have so much empathy for the poor oppressed women of Yale, but no one wonders about their empathy for him? Yes, I am sure the women of Yale did face some oppression for being women, but no one would seriously compare that to growing up fatherless in the Jim Crow south. I would have thought the women of Yale would have had the good taste not to whine about their problems in front of someone like Thomas. To put it in another context, it is really lousy to have a case of the flu, but even lousier taste to whine about how bad it is to have it, to someone who has cancer.

Doodlebug: Hair's like a woman. You treat it good and it treats you good. Ain't that right honey? You hear what I'm saying? Yeah, you got to hold it, caress it, and love it. And if your hair gets out of line you take a scissor and say, "Hair I'm going to cut you."(Cleopatra Jones 1973)

What have all those rich white girls at Yale ever done for the people of Savannah black or white? Further, the assumption of your entire post is that the poor black women of Savannah can only succeed by someone like Thomas or you doing something for them. Why is that? What has anyone ever done for you? Why does their success depend on your help but not yours on theirs? The answer is they are just lesser human beings than you. They can't be expected to succeed on their own the way a white person does. White Supremacy lives on, we just call it by different names now, but at its heart it is still white supremacy.

I guess in the 1970s women were a bit oppressed. The whole date rape/intimate partner abuse/stalking thing was more tolerated. They had valid reason to be upset.

But, by gum, I wouldn't want to work somewhere with a secretary constantly bitching about anyone being oppressed. Let the secretaries fight each other and cattily undermine the women above them. What the hell do secretaries know about politics and oppression? There's a reason we don't pay them much, and it's not just to lord our superiority over them (that is, of course, why some feminists think women get paid less--it's a conspiracy by men to undermine their morale)

I talked to Clarence Thomas years ago when he was head of the EEOC and I was on the editorial board of the San Jose Mercury News. He argued that middle-class white women had gained enormously from the civil rights revolution, while poor blacks, hampered by inadequate education and lack of connections to the power structure, had not been able to take advantage of opportunities. Though his argument was not without merit, his hostility to the women's movement was surprising in a EEOC head.

At first, I'd guessed he was West Indian because his speech was so clipped. He had eradicated his Georgia accent. He talked a bit, quite eloquently, about his childhood. He was a very forceful personality.

Trumpit said..."[W]hat have any of [Justice Thomas'] Supreme Ct. decisions done for anybody...."

I'd suggest that if you're thinking of the case in terms of what good this would do for somebody, you're probably not deciding the case based on neutral principles. As the Chief Justice patiently explained to Durbin during the confirmation hearings, your job on the court is to say what the law is, not help the little guy; if the law says the little guy wins, he wins, and if the law says the big guy wins, he wins. That's what the judge's oath of office - to do justice without respect to person - means.

If you don't think the law does anybody any good, don't run crying to the courts - go tell Congress. That's what they're supposedly there for.

Joanne, if I'm understanding your characterization correctly, Thomas sincerely believed that in this instance, the interests of two groups under the EEOC's wing (if you'll forgive the paternalistic turn of phrase) were in tension. If that's so, if that was his belief, what is the correct position for the head of the EEOC to take? Could he reasonably take the position that if the women's movement was unhelpful to the civil rights movement, the former had to give way?

As a hypothetical, if a head of EEOC were dogmatically pro-choice but was mandated by statute to protect the unborn, how would s/he reconcile the tension they would doubtless perceive between the interests of the unborn and of women, despite a mandate to look after both?

I certainly think women--privileged or otherwise--had some legitimate "complaints" at the time Thomas was at Yale. But it is understandable that, given his background, he would look at their relatively easy lives and say: "give me a break."

And this is a pretty important point, made by Pogo:

But the complaints have riseen over time, and people are even less happy than before.

We have reached critical mass with victimhood. I was just reading a blog in which the (female) host was bemoaning that new study that says women are less happy than men. There was a chorus of replies from women complaining that, oh yes, we *still* have fewer choices than men, and we are "judged" more harshly than men, we are expected to be perfect, etc... Patent bullshit! Women have come to see inconveniences such as balancing family life and work as systemic inequalities that particularly burden women... instead of just, well, Life, which happens to require tough, imperfect choices and real sacrifices.

All of which is to say that we have lost perspective in what "oppression" and victimhood even means these days. It has become easy to blow off the complaints of well-to-do women when they are still complaining even now and often about petty things.

I found it hard to take their "oppression" seriously, since I'd spent the first part of my life living among black women who cooked and kept house for the middle- and upper-class whites of Savannah.

Indeed. Then again if ‘oppression’ is re-defined as lack of opportunity and the ‘glass ceiling’, then I suppose those ladies back in the 60s were indeed oppressed. Then again such complaints ring a wee hollow when women today in other countries faced forced female circumcision, arranged marriages, honor killings and the restriction of some of the most basic rights that would be considered unimaginable in any Western society. When the US Special Forces adopted De Oppresso Liber as their motto, I doubt the ladies of Yale were who they had in mind.

Then again maybe Thomas misunderstood them and they said they were repressed.

Malcolm said..."I am too young to remember the Clarence Thomas/Anita Hill hearings but after reading Ms. Althouse's obnoxious comments, I understand the poisonous environment that existed back then."

Given that the only comment on the passage Ann made was the droll observation that "[s]ecretaries who don't complain are so much easier to take than those feminists who are always needling you," I'm at a loss to see what "obnoxious" comment you're referring to.

It is a little tough to see the urgency of EEOC being made into an affirmative action agency for priveleged white women wanting a leg up on career advancement. Perhaps that was what Thomas disliked.

That affirmative action was used by elites to give their wealthy daughters and black sons a "better than equal opportunity" while it FAILED to help the most needy and deserving - blacks and whites and hispanics in lower socioeconomic strata that needed help the most.

Perhaps it is all those lawsuits that privileged blacks and women from places like Smith and Yale Law School launch to better their own chances rather than the lot of those Missouri secretaries or black immigrant cab drivers that fuels Thomas's Victimhood of Oppressed Wealthy Feminists & Blacks skepticism..

No maybies about it. I worked as a secretary when I first got out of college in the late 70's, and that was the prevailing attitude: "Bosses are @ssholes, but what can you do and where are you gonna go?" And if you went and you did, you were a "troublemaker."

And this is/was different for men going into entry level postitions just exactly how?

I didn't get to go to Yale, and I'm sure almost all those women have better jobs and homes than I do.

Maybe some of them did have it rough in some ways. They're older and grew up in an era where women really weren't treated as well as they are now. But it's hard for me to sympathize too much with people who say they were oppressed while they live better than I do. I have never been oppressed, so how bad could they really have had it?

Actually I find them quite refreshing and if you're a movie buff, will note that they're quite relevant to the topic.

You are a virus on this blog.

Nope, LOS wins that one.

Please cease & desist.

Now that is lame. If you're going to ask someone to stop, there are better ways.

Dr Ray Stantz: Gozer the Gozerian... good evening. As a duly designated representative of the City, County and State of New York, I order you to cease any and all supernatural activity and return forthwith to your place of origin or to the nearest convenient parallel dimension.Dr. Peter Venkman: [Sarcastically] That oughta do it. Thanks very much, Ray. (Ghostbusters, 1984)

Charles Laughton: We know who you are, Mr Rigby. Rigby Reardon: So? I'm interested, who am I? Charles Laughton: You could be a guy that collects 10,000 dollars, just to leave this stinking town. Rigby Reardon: I could, could I? Charles Laughton: And you know who I could be? Rigby Reardon: Hunchback of Notre-Dame? Charles Laughton: I could be the guy who hands you them 10,000 dollars. 10,000 dollars, me to you, just like that. Rigby Reardon: Sorry, but my price for leaving stinking towns is 11,500 and a kiss on the lips from Carmen Miranda. (Dead Men Don't Wear Plaid 1982)